John Marcher’s Uncanny Unmanning in “The Beast in the Jungle”

Abstract

The disquieting effects of Henry James’s literary supernaturalism in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) can be suggestively teased out by considering the relation of the psychological and aesthetic concept of the uncanny to John Marcher’s quest to resolve his problematic masculinity. In the eyes of the world, Marcher wishes to pass as “a man like another,”¹ yet in his imagination, he is “a man [un]like another,” unique in his terrific destiny. According to James’s preface to the New York edition, John Marcher is “another poor, sensitive gentleman,”² a man whose “superstitious soul”³ apprehensively prefigures a fate of heroic and/or tragic dimensions, if he can only maintain the vigilant spirit that such an extraordinary encounter demands. Approaching Marcher’s quest for heroic masculinity through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic investigation of the uncanny, along with Tzevtan Todorov’s concept of the literary uncanny, draws readers into a close encounter with James’s anxious, ambivalent relationship to supernaturalism.